[Spoilers for Game Of Thrones season 8, episode 6.]
Last night, for better or worse, Game Of Thrones finally came to an end. The decisions made throughout its final season—regarding a beloved cast and once-intricate plot—culminated in a episode filled with often baffling resolutions to years of obsessive speculation and theorizing. While there was a lot to groan over, perhaps the worst was the last scene to feature Brienne Of Tarth, a fascinating character who, across these last few episodes, was rendered down to a heartbroken knight defined by her love for Jaime Lannister.
As part of the ending montage, viewers see Brienne sitting down before the records book used by new leaders of the Kingsguard to document their predecessors’ most noteworthy achievements. Rather than do anything to mark her growth from a character defined in relation to others to someone who ostensibly learned to stand confident in her own decisions, Brienne’s story ends with her turning to Jaime’s section and writing that, in short, he’s a good dude even though he dumped her for his sister after a one-night stand.
The shot of her concentrating over the book, quill in hand, is one of the purest meme prompts popular culture’s provided in some time. The internet, of course, is taking full advantage of the opportunity through a seemingly endless torrent of better ideas for what Brienne could have been scribbling in the book.
An entire subgenre of the memes sees Brienne adding mean, post break-up notes to the book in revenge for Jaime leaving in the middle of the night to return to Cersei, forgoing common courtesy and the character work that might have helped explain his about-face, in an earlier episode.